Democrats Say: Arrest the Messenger!

Beginning with the ACORN videos that he made with Hannah Giles, James O’Keefe has been a thorn in the side of liberalism. Most recently, he has gone after the voter fraud issue, demonstrating in a series of videos under the rubric Project Veritas how easy it is to vote illegally. Here in Minnesota, he and his colleagues obtained, with no difficulty, ballots in the names of “Tim Tebow” and “Tom Brady,” shortly after the Super Bowl. Needless to say, no identification was requested, and there are no such Minnesota voters. In New Hampshire, the Project Veritas crew got ballots in the names of deceased voters. “How would I know if they were dead or not?” laughs one New Hampshire poll worker.

It is an article of faith on the Left that there is no evidence of significant voter fraud. This is false; here in Minnesota, to name just one state, investigators have uncovered a large number of incidents of fraud. But a larger point also needs to be made: to the extent that not a lot of ballots are proved to be fraudulent, why is that? Obviously, when no effort is made to enforce the law, not many lawbreakers will be caught. That is basically what is going on today. Lax laws make fraud easy. Given that in Democrat-controlled states there is no effort to monitor ballot integrity, how would perpetrators ever be caught?

Most voters grasp this basic point, so evidence of laxity such as that gathered by O’Keefe is devastating to the Democrats’ position. So how do the Democrats respond? As the large majority of voters would wish, by tightening up procedures to prevent fraud? Of course not! They blame the messenger; and in New Hampshire, they may be trying to arrest the messenger.

Twitchy, following O’Keefe’s Twitter feed, reports that New Hampshire’s Democratic Attorney General, Michael Delaney, has “attempted to serve a criminal grand jury subpoena on [O'Keefe] at event in NH.” So far, at least, the attempt has apparently been unsuccessful. But this is a classic abuse of government power: rather than deal with the fact that its lax laws and procedures encourage voter fraud and compromise the integrity of every election in New Hampshire, that state’s Democratic power structure prefers to come down like a ton of bricks on the young man who exposed the problem. Presumably they will claim that the Project Veritas team’s obtaining of ballots in the names of dead New Hampshire voters constituted voter fraud–the only voter fraud, I suspect, in which the state’s Democratic Attorney General has ever taken any interest. In order for them to have a point, one would think that O’Keefe and his friends would have had to actually cast the ballots, which as far as I know they didn’t do. But a criminal investigation doesn’t have to succeed to achieve its purpose. The Democrats’ goal is twofold: to discredit investigative reporters like O’Keefe, and to intimidate them so they will stop shedding light on the corruption that Democratic administrations encourage and rely on.

You can keep up with this story by following James O’Keefe’s Twitter feed as well as Twitchy. For now, O’Keefe isn’t backing down. He says he is going to serve a FOIA request on the Department of Justice for “all communications between NH AG and US AG Eric Holder to determine who’s really behind this.”